What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is a membership platform that teaches you how to create an online business IN ANY NICHE that is built around a profitable website.

Within the WA platform, you will receive all of the tools, training, and technical support needed to transform your ideas into profits. You can see these element listed on the left hand side of the image above (training, live events, live chat, websites, etc).

The graphic below represents the WA approach to building a profitable online business and website.

Step 1 – Choose and Interest

Everything begins with your topic of interest. This is a big plus because you can build your business / website around your passion. You aren’t locked in to promoting a particular company’s products (as with network marketing).

Step 2 – Build a Website

WA provides all of the tools to build a beautiful WordPress website. This includes, hosting, domain registration, WordPress as the back end of your website, an SSL certificate to keep visitor data safe, and site security to protect agains hacks and malware.

Step 3 – Attract Visitors

WA’s training also shows you how to create keyword rich content to rank your pages / posts in Google in order to attract a steady stream of organic traffic.

Step 4 – Monetize

Using the concept of affiliate marketing, WA will show you how to turn your visitors into online passive income.

Wealthy Affiliate Training

The training inside of Wealthy Affiliate is phenomenal. There are two core courses each with several modules:

Online Entrepreneur Certification

Affiliate Marketing

The Online Entrepreneur Certification course consists of five phases that teach you how to create and grow an online business / website in ANY niche. The training starts at the beginner’s level and progresses to intermediate and advanced levels.

Level 1 – Getting Started – Takes you through the process of choosing a niche, creating a website, basic keyword research and teaching you how to create content.

Level 2 – Building Your Own Traffic Producing Website – This phase builds on the previous as you learn how to brand your website with your own domain, add images to your posts, improve your SEO rankings and build out more content on your site.

Level 3 – Making Money – Show me the money and in this phase you’ll learn how to turn all of your website visitors into commissions. You’ll learn all about affiliate products and networks, leverage product reviews, using Adsense and more.

Level 4 – Mastering Social Engagement – As the name implies, this phase teaches you the most practical and impactful ways to use social media for increased engagement and sales on your website. It covers Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and Google+.

Level 5 – Achieving Maximum Success Through Content Creation – This high-level phase extends your skills in research and content creation, techniques for boosting engagement and conversion and even using outsourcing to create content.

Affiliate Marketing Bootcamp

Affiliate Marketing Bootcamp walks you through creating a website to promote any niche related to Wealthy Affiliate, including the WA platform itself. This would include anything in the Internet marketing, online marketing, network marketing, business opportunity, and home business niches.

Level 2 – Content, Keywords and Conversions – This phase shows you how to choose strategic keywords and create content that converts visitors into commissions.

Level 3 – Giving Your Site Social Value – This phase is all about increasing the social profile of your site. In addition, you’ll add Google Analytics to your site and learn how to promote WA’s keyword tool for an additional income stream.

Level 4 – Get Visual, Get Aesthetic, Get a Brand – This phase is all about website design, using images, creating a logo, creating videos and leveraging the power of Pinterest.

Level 5 – Knowing Your Audience… – This phase is all about knowing your audience and creating content that converts. It also covers more video techniques plus YouTube live.

Live Training / Courses

If the two core trainings were not enough, Wealthy Affiliate also has a vast library of training courses on just about any subject. In addition, WA hosts many live trainings throughout the year by expert online marketers:

Here you can see a partial list of the multiple courses that are offered on different subjects including Local Marketing in case you are interested in building an agency:

Building Websites with WA

WA also provides you with an array of tools to build out your websites using WordPress. You get FREE hosting with your Premium membership as well as SSL (which makes your websites secure for your visitors).

In addition, there are many features which provide you a tremendous advantage when building your websites inside of WA:

Site Comments

You can submit a post for site comments and other members will read your posts and provide you with engagement. These are real comments from real visitors.

The best part is that you get SEO juice from engagement lifting your ranks and the more engagement you have, the more willing your other visitors will be to engage as well.

Site Feedback

Another golden feature, you can also submit your site to get feedback from other members. The environment is friendly and positive.

The result is that you can get tremendous feedback on your site design and content prior to making it available to the wider world.

Site Content Creator

Content is a scary word for a lot of people. However, if you are going to succeed with your website, it is absolutely crucial that you know how to create engaging and useful content.

With the content creator, you get one central hub that is dedicated to helping you achieve that.

This includes a no distraction editor, the ability to organize your content and measure your progress as well as being able to create templates for future use. The goal setting feature is also key (by word or article count) since without some type of accountability it’s hard to get started and stay motivated.

Keyword Research / SEO

You will find that many Wealthy Affilaite websites are highly ranked within the search engines. This includes Google, Bing and Yahoo.This is one of WA’s strenghts, which is, teaching you how to create SEO worthy content that ranks in the search engines.

The result is a steady stream of high quality traffic which is organic. This means that once you put in the time to cultivate it, you no longer have to pay for it (like with PPC campaigns). It also means that you can create multiple niche websites once you know the SEO secrets.

A big part of those secrets is Jaaxy, a tool that WA provides for doing keyword research.

Using this tool, you can instantly find targeted, low competition keywords. It will also tell you the search volume.

Do you see the KQI column?

That’s the keyword index. If it says “Great” in green, you are golden. It means you can compete for the keyword. If you create your post the way that you are taught inside of Wealthy Affiliate, you have a chance to siphon some of that search traffic in the first column.

More visitors = more conversions = more sales.

See for yourself. Enter a keyword below:

Here you can see everything you get with the Jaaxy tool which is available to Premium members of Wealthy Affiliate:

Many of these options are self-explanatory. You can see where your site ranks, search for affiliate programs, save keyword lists, and discover little know niches (with Alphabet Soup).

Finally, if you are looking for hot trends, this tool will also provide that.

The WA Community / Getting Help

A big feature of Wealthy Affiliate is the community.

It is an extremely helpful, positive and generous group of entrepreneurs. This is a community who believes in paying it forward. Therefore, many members are always willing to provide that little push or technical expertise when you most need it.

There are several ways within the platform to ask for help from the community as well:

The Question Feature

This is very cool. In any discussion, simply type in a question and a message will appear: “Need community help with your question? Yes / No.

Your question will automatically be sent community wide into instant chat where dozens of members respond within minutes.

The Magic Search Bar

At the top of every page is the magic search bar, which allows you to search the WA posts, blogs, questions, and trainings. It’s like Google search but laser focused on Internet Marketing.

No matter how simple or complex your question, it is likely someone has asked it, answered it and maybe even created a training for it.

Technical Support

Of course, WA has a full technical support group. They are knowledgeable and prompt. This is often a big complaint of other programs, where you send a request and don’t receive an answer for days.

Promoting Wealthy Affiliate

Wealthy Affiliate also has a robust affiliate program. Also, they provide the Affiliate Bootcamp training to show you how to promote WA (see earlier).

As you can see, you will receive a recurring commission of $23.50 for every premium member for as long as they maintain their subscription.

This is the way you can build online passive income.

Wealthy Affiliate operates on what is a called a Freemium model. This means that someone can sign up to Wealthy Affiliate as a free member. You can see the difference in benefits here:

You get two free websites and Level One of each training course. Inside of the platform, there are many incentives for upgrading to Premium.

You can see, the conversion from Free to Premium is 12%, which means that for every 12 referrals, one converts to Premium on average.

What I Like About Wealthy Affiliate

There are many other features I could list, but I’ll stop there. Here are some of my favorites things about Wealthy Affiliate:

Super training with proven results (just follow each step)

Training on a variety of topics related to Internet marketing

Experts at creating high-traffic, profitable websites

Focus is on building quality websites that help people not just making a buck

Drawbacks to Wealthy Affiliate

No program is ever perfect and Wealthy Affiliate is no exception. Here are WA’s shortcomings

Geared for Website Creators

If you are someone that doesn’t like to create content, then WA will be a struggle for you.

You don’t have to be an expert writer or anything like that, but if you are looking for a more traditional affiliate marketing opportunity, where you have a simple website (landing page, e-mail opt-in, sales page), then WA will be overkill.

SEO / Keyword Research Focused

If you are looking to become an expert in Facebook or YouTube advertising, then WA is probably not for you. The focus is on creating keyword rich posts. There are a few individual trainings on those subjects, but again, that is not the focus.

Overall, however, I would give Wealthy Affiliate high marks for its training, program, community and support.